Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Monday, May 16, 2016

Feds might deny oil, gas leases to climate activist

The Bureau of Land Management has been auctioning off public land for
oil and gas drilling for decades. But nothing could have prepared the
agency for what's happening now in Utah. Nearly 100 climate activists disrupted a lease auction in Salt Lake City
earlier this year, saying the United States needs to stop extracting
oil and gas if it hopes to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The fireworks continued after the auction, when the environmental writer
Terry Tempest Williams submitted bids for two oil and gas
leases — covering more than 1,100 acres — that hadn't drawn any interest
during the auction. Williams wanted to make sure that no one could drill on those lands.
She and her husband Brooke were willing to pay $2,500 out of their own
pockets to make it happen. But the federal government might not let them. Three
months after the auction, the Bureau of Land Management still hasn't
decided whether to give Williams the leases she successfully bid on.
Officials at the agency's Utah office are "seeking to clarify Ms.
Williams' intent to exercise reasonable diligence in developing and
producing the oil and gas leases she has offered to purchase," Ryan
Sutherland, a spokesperson for the Utah office, said in an email last
month...more